“Polytechnic,” it turned out, was the night that Greek college students rose up and eventually brought down the Greek dictatorship, in 1974. In the years that followed, Socialist parties redressed the wrongs of the civil war and the dictatorship by offering financial restitution to civil war fighters, as well as generous social and economic policies to their constituents, which over time grew into bloated and unnecessary patronage for votes. This restitution of the left and others, went the story, was the foundation of Greece’s dysfunctional policies that helped lead to the financial crisis of 2009. The reason all the Greeks I met still talked about the civil war, and the American intervention, was that there was no way otherwise to explain what had happened next.
George Papandreou, the prime minister in Greece I was writing about in 2010, the one charged with saving the economy by implementing austerity measures imposed on him by the West, was the grandson of Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou, who had been deposed by a U.S.-supported military coup. The current Prime Minister Papandreou was also the son of the outspoken American critic Andreas Papandreou. I had interviewed his son, Nick, the one who rode the Metro, with none of this knowledge. To write about Greece in 2010 as a basket case of its own making was an abnegation of responsibility and even accuracy; to pronounce the ways in which it was “behind” was to parrot the language of modernization theory, and to belittle it as such without awareness of the political intervention and military coup my own country instigated, and which arguably, if anything, set the country “back,” was to be disrespectfully disconnected from the historical experience of my own subjects and indeed from my own country. Greece always seemed a pleasant European country to my American sensibility. Now I knew, well into a twenty-first century in which the word “counterinsurgency” rolls off all American tongues, that Greece was where my country’s concept of “counterterror” found its first violent home. I left beautiful Athens haunted by the palliative effects of my own ignorance.
Anatol Lieven writes that Americans have viewed their own “unpleasantness” during the Cold War as necessary evils foisted upon innocent souls desperate to defeat a truly evil foe. The state of innocence Americans constantly return to—this little sand berm on an ocean of misdeeds—exists because Americans say it does, but when you actually read the history of foreign interventions, you do begin to wonder where it ever came from. In Guatemala, a country whose democratically elected president we overthrew in one of the foundational American military coups of the post-1945 era, the vicious military would become known for smashing babies’ heads against walls, punching pregnant women until they miscarried, and burying people alive.
Was I not actively endorsing the American way—of committing acts and forgetting them, of living in this denial—if I wrote about a foreign country without first understanding the American relationship with it, a relationship that transformed that country’s development and produced my way of looking at the world? This was where objectivity as an ideal was undemanding; objectivity for Americans would require first a full reckoning with history, the sort of truth and reconciliation commission of the soul that William Appleman Williams advocated for as early as the 1950s. This utter distortion of reality, in which an American journalist could be killed by people who considered themselves “Americans” and his death blamed on Greek Communists, makes even terrorist acts seem rather like an insistence of reality, as when the Athens Hilton hotel—whose enormous building spanned countless city blocks and ruined the view from the Acropolis—was bombed by Greek leftist rebels in 1969, a terrorist act that was also the beginning of a slow clawing toward anything that resembles truth.
*
ONCE, A SHOPKEEPER whom I saw almost every day in my Istanbul neighborhood—I bought my milk and soda water from him—asked me whether I was ever returning to the United States. I replied that I was, in fact, traveling to New York that month, but would come back to Turkey in a few weeks. “You know”—I grimaced theatrically—“New York is a difficult place.” I always said such things, more as a tribute to Istanbul, because I knew some Turks—usually upper-class Turks, or anyone who still dreamed of the West as a salvation—also found it surprising to hear that I loved Istanbul more than New York City.
My shopkeeper was not an upper-class White Turk; he was Kurdish. He looked at me sympathetically: “Ya, your country really has exploited the world, hasn’t it?”
The verb he used, s?mürmek, has many meanings, which out of curiosity I looked up when I got home. The online dictionary most young Turks used for English usually proffered an array of colorful English translations. For s?mürmek, it said:
exploit
to suck all the nourishment from
to eat up (everything in sight)
to exploit, use (someone, something) wrongfully for one’s own ends
to exploit, to presume on; to gobble
trade on
to suck (a liquid) (into one’s mouth)
sweat
milk
put upon
use
presume on
presume upon
make capital out of
It was because of the Communist crisis in Greece that the Americans included its neighbor Turkey in the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine. After helping the Americans fight the Koreans in 1950, the Turks had welcomed admission to NATO; some of them, like I had, even viewed the Truman Doctrine as a rescue operation. By the mid-1950s, the United States had erected its own army, navy, air force, and intelligence stations all over Turkey; Incirlik Air Base, near the southern Turkish city of Adana, was to be America’s Middle Eastern outpost, and the place where America kept many of its nuclear weapons.
Within a decade, some thirty thousand Americans, mostly military personnel, came to live on Turkish soil. NATO flooded the country with pro-American propaganda—it was in fact a condition of the Marshall Plan that it be allowed to do so—and strengthened ties “between Turkish labor and anti-communist international labor federations.” The intent, the academic Amy Austin Holmes writes, was to make Turkish labor unions “economic rather than political,” or, in other words, pro-American rather than Communist. The union most directly influenced by the Americans in those years was Türk-??, the union that had failed to protect the miners of Soma.
In response, Turkish leftists began to believe that NATO membership did not guarantee security as much as ensure that Turkey would remain a capitalist country. The Turkish people became uneasy about the strange social mores of their new American neighbors. Although the Americans were stationed in Turkey ostensibly to protect the Turks from the Soviets, Turks feared that they were being saved from one threat only to be savaged by another. The novelist Ya?ar Kemal, whom a CIA officer once tried to convince to leave the Workers’ Party because he would sell more books in America that way, wrote a letter to American newspapers in an attempt to spare them “from the disgust of other nations,” and accused Americans of “entering our hearts like a traitor’s dagger”: